NEW YORK — New York's attorney general filed suit against SiriusXM on Wednesday, accusing the satellite radio and streaming service of deliberately making it difficult for its customers to cancel their subscriptions.
Attorney General Letitia James' office said an investigation into customer complaints found that SiriusXM forced subscribers to wait in an automated system before often lengthy interactions with agents trained in ways to prevent a request for the service cancellation was accepted.
“Having to go through a lengthy and frustrating process to cancel a subscription is a stressful burden that no one looks forward to, and when companies make it difficult to cancel subscriptions it is illegal,” the attorney said general in a statement.
The company disputed the claims, arguing that many of the long interaction times cited in the lawsuit were based on a 2020 study and were caused in part by the pandemic's impact on their operations. The company said many of its plans can be canceled with the simple click of a button online.
“Like a number of consumer companies, we offer customers a variety of options to sign up for or cancel their SiriusXM subscription and, upon receipt and review of the complaint, we intend to vigorously defend against these baseless allegations that grossly mischaracterizes SiriusXM's practices,” Jessica Casano-Antonellis, a spokeswoman for the company, said in a statement.
The attorney general's office cited affidavits in which customers complained about long wait times in an automated system to chat with an agent, only to endure lengthy attempts to keep their business. It takes subscribers an average of 11.5 minutes to cancel by phone and 30 minutes to cancel online, although it takes much longer for many subscribers, the attorney general's office said.
According to the lawsuit, in 2019 and 2021, more than 578,000 subscribers who wanted to cancel by phone abandoned their efforts while waiting in line to connect with the live agent.
“When I finally spoke to the first customer representative and explained that I had been waiting for almost half an hour, I was promptly hung up on. That meant I had to wait again. Another 30 minutes just to cancel a service I would have preferred to cancel online,” one customer wrote in an affidavit.
The company said that in 2021, online chat agents responded to consumer messages within 36 seconds to 2.4 minutes on average.
The lawsuit seeks financial penalties, including compensation for the time customers spent online during what the attorney general called an “intentionally lengthy” cancellation process.